In Reply to: Re: Morning after sour grapes posted by azn_balla on February 14, 2025 at 10:29:03
Jonathan Lee, who of late writes the game stories for BRO, noted that the Bruins flat out ran out of gas in the last five minutes. I suspect he's right. But SC also did some things to win that game - they tried, for three quarters mostly, to defend Betts one-on-one. The result was we staged a big comeback later in Q2 and we took control of the game in Q3. In Q4 they began to swarm her whenever she got the ball. Also, Betts cheated on defense for much of the game until then, hanging back under the hoop and daring the Trojans to hit relatively open shots from in the key, 2 or 3 feet inside the FT line. For three quarters, SC just couldn't sink those shots. In Q4 they finally began to fall and Betts had to start moving away from the hoop a bit to contest them and that opened up the inside area for SC to be able to attack. For three quarters, Watkins had a great game but got no help at all from her teammates. No one else even scored in the middle two quarters except for a very lucky desperation long shot by that freshman (name eludes me). Once Iriafen finally turned it on and she and Watkins got all over Lauren, SC rose with the home crowd behind them and we fell apart. Sure we did run out of gas - especially compared to SC - but that means they started off better and in the end they were the tougher and better shooting team last night. Good for them. Hope we return the favor on March 1st. As to your last observation, it does seem like there are a lot more big comebacks of late - a lot bigger than that one was. I think many of them are due to three point shooting. Problem is, outside shooting can come and go. Tyler Bilodeau hits what was it - 5-7 iirc - against Illinois. Want to bet he can do it again tonight? Three point shooting has been very good for the women's team. But some games it isn't there at all. The turnovers were a killer but on March 1st we'd better have someone in Watkins' face the entire game AND we need a strategy to deal with SC's game in the paint and avoiding what they did to us in Q4 in rebounding last night (we actually were doing fine in rebounding for much of the game and got absolutely swamped on the board when SC really turned it up especially the last half of Q4 last night.)